I’m building a small startup in Georgia. The country, not the state. No VCs, all bootstrapped. And I do want to use the resources available to people building stuff, so I have a scheduled task in ChatGPT that looks for startup programs I could use.
One day ChatGPT is very excited. Hey, I found an amazing deal, you could get up to $150k in credits from Microsoft for Startups. I’ve never used Azure, but I’ve used GCP and AWS. With a proper setup - IaC and flakes of Nix, does it really matter? So I jumped right in.
I was horribly wrong.
Even finding the application was a mess. The documentation was all over the place, mentioning things that didn’t exist in my account. Fine, these things get updated. Eventually I found the thing, created an account, and saw a little icon saying $200 had been credited. A button said to verify with LinkedIn. Amazing! I did that. Next: verify your business information.
The form asks for the business name and identification numbers. You have to supply one ID. I give it two: the Georgian business registration number and the D-U-N-S number I use for Apple verification. There’s no document upload. You enter the numbers, then the address.
My company’s registered address is a mess. It has a street number, a separate building number, a flat number. I enter it, click verify, and nothing happens. The form goes nowhere. I edit the punctuation, try different characters. Still nothing. But when I open the network requests in Chrome, Microsoft’s address verification API is returning an invalid-address error. The form isn’t telling me that.
So I get oh-my-pi/deepseek-v4-flash to investigate. It tests the API separately, outside the browser session, trying different versions of the address and then other addresses in Tbilisi. Eventually it finds a nearby address in my district that works. I manually enter that address and submit the application.
“We couldn’t verify your startup.”
Alright. I need support.
Find your Microsoft team
I can’t find a support button. I search for how to contact Microsoft for Startups, and the public documentation tells me to find the box titled “Your Microsoft Team” and select “Get program support.” I have no such box. I have no idea where my Microsoft team is.
So I go through ordinary Azure support. You enter your problem, get articles, go through the AI thing trying to advise you, and eventually find the little link that lets you actually create a ticket. I also buy the paid support plan. I want a response time. I want someone to look at this.
And the initial reply is quick. On August 17, the day I submit the application, support replies. Unfortunately, they can’t see my application in their system yet. Please wait.
By the way, the people replying to me all have Microsoft email addresses. Their employer, right there in the headers, is BEYONDSOFT CONSULTING INC.
I explain that the portal already says verification failed. Can we keep the ticket open and find out what happened? On August 19, they confirm they still can’t see it. They’ve escalated to Engineering, and other customers are having similar issues.
August 25: any update? Still waiting for Engineering. August 30: nearly two weeks now, same problem. I get an automatic reply saying the engineer is on leave until September 8, so I ask someone else to take ownership. Someone replies, says they’ve contacted the internal team, and asks me to keep waiting.
By September 9, I’m asking whether this is how issues are going to be handled on Azure. Do we have any timeframe whatsoever?
You must construct additional accounts
Finally, Engineering has a solution. Create another Microsoft account and apply again. Once that application passes verification, support will transfer the credits back to my original account. This is, in their words, “the only viable path they have identified.”
There’s a problem with that plan. My LinkedIn verification is already attached to the first account. I point this out, with a link to Microsoft’s own documentation.
Meanwhile, support sends a follow-up saying that if I don’t respond within 24 to 48 hours, they’ll assume everything is sorted and close the ticket.
Nothing is sorted. You’ve spent three weeks unable to find my application, and now I have 24 to 48 hours to stop you from declaring the problem solved.
Under no circumstances should you refresh the form
On September 11, the instructions come back: apply for the Azure Self-Service Offer with a new email address, using the same account name and LinkedIn profile details. And this bit is bold and highlighted in yellow:
please note you shouldn’t refresh the portal while filling the verify startup information.
Okay. Now I’m scared of breaking the form. I’m thinking about broken state, session tokens, timeouts. I put everything else aside, close the windows, create a fresh Chrome profile, get my documents ready. I’m focused. I’m going to fill this thing out in one go. It’s a game now, and I have to win it.
The first step fails.
This account can’t be used for Microsoft for Startups credits
The LinkedIn problem I had already raised. I email support again. Apparently I’m in the Microsoft for Startups offer, and I need the Azure Self-Service Offer. ASO. I had understood “self-service” to mean applying myself, without an offer code. No, that’s a different thing. I’d searched for it and couldn’t work out where I was supposed to go.
This time they send me an activation link. I click it. Two hundred dollars credited. The business-verification button appears. Alright. Another attempt. Let’s kill this beast.
Again, everything else is aside. Documents ready, no distractions. My partner is talking to me from the other room. No, I’m filling out the Microsoft form. This is the thing I’m doing.
I get to the address field, and I remember: it won’t accept my address.
Now I have a fork in the road. Do I stop and ask support? They took three weeks to tell me to start again. I’ve already started this form. They’ve specifically told me not to interrupt it. If I fuck this up, am I going to lose another account to whatever happened to the first one? Or do I enter the nearby address I know works, finish the form, and immediately send them the real documents and explain?
I do the thing I would tell anyone else not to do. I use the placeholder again.
The application goes through. The status says they’re reviewing my startup. I email support immediately, explain exactly what I’ve done, and give them the registered address. I explicitly call the other address a placeholder.
On September 12, support replies:
Thank you for the update, and I’m glad to hear that you have successfully submitted the verification information and that the status now shows “We are reviewing your startup verification.”
They can now see the application. They ask for a document confirming the company’s official registered address. And:
I understand your concern regarding the address format, especially since the official address contains separate building and flat numbers. We will share the relevant details with the Vetting team for their review.
Great. They understand. I send the Georgian Public Registry extract and the D-U-N-S record within twenty minutes. Both show the registered address. There’s a public registry link. This is a real company, and here’s how to verify it.
Later that day, the status changes to “We couldn’t verify your startup.” I email again. What’s going on?
Please prove you live at the placeholder
On September 15, almost a month after this started, I get the update from Vetting:
I am afraid that the document you have provided does not contain the address that is displayed on your profile account.
They list the placeholder address from the account and the real address from the documents. Then:
Can you send us a recent document that contains the address and company name as they appear on your account?
What? I told you. I told you exactly this. You acknowledged it. You asked me for the real documents so you could take the discrepancy to Vetting. I sent them.
So I explain it again. There is no document showing the placeholder as my company’s address. Please verify against the official documents I supplied. I get another paragraph highlighted in yellow:
As mentioned previously, when reapplying, it is important to ensure that the exact account name and address are entered correctly and match the information in the supporting documents. Unfortunately, once the application has been submitted, our team does not have the ability to modify the submitted information or manually override the Business Verification (BV) process.
The September 11 instructions said to use the same account name and LinkedIn profile, and not to refresh. Nothing about the address.
Okay, then reset the application and tell me how to enter the real address. I’ll resubmit the same day.
No. The reply says:
Please note that once the Business Verification (BV) application has been submitted, it cannot be resubmitted or modified now the only option is to send the same document or else we cannot proceed again.
The second application, I’m then told, was an exception because the original one wasn’t visible in their system. Another application will not be accepted. The available option is to provide the “same supporting document that was submitted for the BV application”.
I cannot give you that document. The company has never had that address. To give you what you’re asking for, I would have to fabricate one.
Then I get this:
There is no known issue or bug with the BV process in this regard. We have also seen other customers from Georgia successfully complete Business Verification when the information provided in their application and supporting documents is consistent.
There is a bug. The address step calls Microsoft.Billing/validateAddress and won’t proceed unless the response is Valid. On September 15, I send support a fresh log: nine variations of my registered street address, including plain 1 Nakashidze Street, the full address, Georgian script, and building and flat numbers moved to the second address line. All return Invalid. So even removing the supposedly troublesome building and flat numbers doesn’t get me through.
That same run accepts 44 Kostava Street and 1 Kote Abkhazi Street, the placeholder. The log has timestamps and request IDs. Microsoft can look these requests up in its own logs.
While writing this, I also test Parliament’s address: 8 Shota Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi, 0118, exactly as listed on Parliament’s own website. Invalid. With the comma, without the comma, with the street name shortened. Still Invalid. We’re talking about the Parliament of Georgia, on the most famous avenue in Tbilisi.
Other customers from Georgia passing verification does absolutely nothing for the field in front of me. My documents show the registered address. The validator rejects that address. Vetting requires the account to match the documents. I can’t change the application, I can’t reapply, and support can’t override it. They keep asking for a document that cannot exist.
Back in the email thread, the same reply denying the bug also says:
If “1 Kote Apkhazi Street” was not the company address, we would need to understand why this address was provided in the supporting documentation.
It wasn’t in the supporting documentation. It was in the form. The documents have always shown the registered address. That’s the entire reason we’re having this conversation.
Can I speak to a supervisor?
At this point I ask for a supervisor. For the record, I write:
I cannot provide a document showing an address the company has never had, and I will not create one.
The support engineer loops in her team lead and sends a case summary. It says:
At that time, the BV status was already showing as Failed, so we requested the required supporting documents from the customer.
No. Her September 12 email explicitly says “We are reviewing your startup verification.” She quoted the reviewing status herself, in bold, then asked for the documents. It’s in this same thread.
The summary says:
We clearly informed the customer that the information provided in the BV application should match the supporting documents.
Now the warning she hadn’t given me before reapplying was in the case summary. When I disclosed the placeholder on September 12, she asked for my official registered-address documents and said she’d pass the concern to Vetting.
Then:
However, the customer has confirmed that they do not have the document that was used for the application.
I never said that. The application doesn’t even let you upload a document. I entered identification numbers. She asked for supporting documents afterward, and I sent them. I have those documents. What I cannot produce is a document showing an address the company has never had.
The summary is false. The supervisor is being given a story where I was clearly warned, submitted the wrong information anyway, and can’t produce my documents. The rejected address, the warning not to refresh, my immediate disclosure, her acknowledgment: where did all of that go?
So I go back through the same thread, extract the dates, and quote the emails to correct a summary written by the person who exchanged those emails with me. I asked to speak to someone else, and now I have to explain to that person what actually happened before we can even get back to the address field.
Engineering and Vetting are always somewhere else. I haven’t heard from either team directly.
I ask again: verify the company against the official records already supplied, or have Engineering make the registered address enterable and reset the application. I’ll resubmit the same day. If neither can happen, tell me who owns Business Verification so I can take it to them.
An exception
While I’m writing this, the team lead replies.
She acknowledges that I flagged the address discrepancy before review. She says the documents show a consistent registered address, and she’s going to check whether they can verify against those documents.
Finally. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain.
Later that evening, another email arrives from the engineer:
As per your request, our team has made an exception on your account and completed the credit upgrade.
I open the portal. “$5,000 of $150,000 credits unlocked.” The five thousand is there, available through June 9, 2027.
Oh. Alright. So there is an exception.
Earlier today, I was being told there was no way to proceed without a document for an address my company has never had. No changes, no resubmission, no manual override. Now the credits are there. I haven’t changed the address. I haven’t sent different company documents.
I’m glad this finally went somewhere. But what exactly happened here?
Did they verify the company against the registry extract and D-U-N-S record, or did they bypass verification? And what happens to the address bug? Has it been filed with Engineering? The next person won’t have this email thread.
So I reply, thank them, confirm the credits are visible, and ask those two questions. If the bug has been filed with Engineering, give me the reference. I can follow it separately. Once those questions are answered, we’re good to close.
Anyway. The credits are there. I can get back to building the thing I wanted them for in the first place.
This was a ridiculous amount of work to get through a form. I’m writing it down because someone else is going to hit this, and they shouldn’t have to figure all of it out again. If you end up here with the same problem, I hope this saves you a few weeks. And remember - do not refresh the form.